Will to Innocence

Will to Innocence.

A contemplation of William Blake. Poet and painter.

By Martin J Cooke.

Part i) Auguries of Innocence. *(1)

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:

``Pipe a song about a Lamb!''

So I piped with a merry chear.

``Piper, pipe that song again;''

So I piped: he wept to hear.

``Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy chear:''

So I sung the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.

``Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.''

So he vanish'd from my sight,

And I pluck'd a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain'd the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs,

Every child may joy to hear.

‘Introduction’ Songs of Innocence and of Experience. 1791

*(2)

The garret creaks with miscellany. Downstairs a group of frightened boys are taking opium. The narrow corridor leads to a flight of stairs and in an upstairs Kitchen, ‘Carol’, a prostitute, throws open the sash window with a dull clatter, leans out and unleashes a round of obscenities towards a man standing on the cracked pavement below. The man, evidently her erstwhile client, an expansive and ejaculatory costermonger, is expounding upon the notion that he had ‘lost some money’ in her room and was now threatening to come back and ‘do her in’ with a cricket bat. The dialogue fills the air with sharp crawky*(3)  outcries, which, to the young man on the landing, observing the debacle with curiosity and irritation, seemed confluent with the wafts of opium smoke drifting through the open window, mingling invidiously in the atmosphere, yet buffering and ameliorating the crass harshness of the vituperative intercourse.

The nearest door, (with the coppers boot marks,) next to the little communal kitchen, the entrance to his shabby room, closes abruptly. The boot marks betray evidence of the regular raids which the local constabulary visit upon the occupants of this notorious Soho address. The next but one dirty laminated door belongs to the actual target of their raids; Jason, shifty criminal, comic-book anti hero, heroin dealer, errant child, an accidental murderer toying haphazardly with a box of matches near a petrol pump. On one of these intermittent raids, the rozzers stop in their tracks, staring in momentary consternation at our young man, as he reads upon the simple bed in his bare room, an innocent abroad; as unlikely a target for their obtrusive dispensation of British justice as one could possibly imagine.

‘Jason is in the next room but one…’ says our man, laconically.

The sound of another sash window at the back of the house blaps shut, as Jason, the comic book bad boy, duly makes a quick getaway and leaves the frustrated ‘Oi-ing’ bobbies hobnailing in his wake.

*

‘It was 1765 and William Blake, born in Soho, London, in 1757,’ murmurs the young man, reading aloud from Richard Holmes’ introduction to the 1991 copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience, given to him that Christmas by his mother, ‘Saw a tree filled with Angels’ he was eight years old, the place: Peckham Rye. ‘Their bright wings’, continues the introduction, ‘bespangling every bough like stars’. His visionary gifts, as a painter, engraver and poet, never left him; and when he died, in a two room garret in Fountain Court, Strand, in 1827, he was singing.

If you can see Angels in Peckham, then you must be a flaming genius, he mused, echoing Coleridge, who after they met in Fountains Court, thought Blake a genius; or an escapee from the insane asylum, he snorted, like Wordsworth, who thought Blake a lunatic. All that bespangles the vertiginous sprigs of Peckham nowadays are plaggy Tesco’s and Harrods bags; the triumph of their plasticity, bespangling every off shore trading account from the Virgin Islands to eternity; he speculated, disparagingly.

* (5) 

Every Night and every Morn

Some to Misery are Born.

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight.

Some are Born to sweet delight,

Some are Born to Endless Night. 

*(6)

The young man had a vision that afternoon after the whore’s client had formalized the cessation of his over-optimistic request to return to her room and rifle through her drawers for his lost wallet. With a final F and blind, trailing a flurry of ineloquent vituperations in his wake, he stomped off to a nearby tavern to drown his sorrows and curse his fate.

The vision consisted of a meeting with the young man’s self as a child; as three ghosts of his childhood; Himself as a child aged 5, as an 8 year old and as a child of 11. The meetings took place in a spirit of reconciliation. Forgiveness was exchanged, formally; the apologies the promises, the bitter feelings relieved, initiations of acceptance, consequent waves commensurately healing, like presentations of gifts. Peace took the place of distress and the sea of troubles became calm. He promised there would always be a home for the trinity of children. I’m sorry he said, I love you, I’m sorry for exposing you to abuse, William Blake stayed at home until he was ten and learned to read and write, we should have done the same. And they ended by promising to never again hate and betray each other.

As suddenly as it had begun, the vision abated and passed into a unity of pastoral quietude; the children merged into a single child, simply playing, at the edge of the forest, in the warm summer sun; and the young man fell asleep and began to dream.

The Laughing song.

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha, ha he!"

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha, ha, he!"

Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

The dream started with a small, belligerent and agitated man entering the house, rattling a set of keys, issuing nervous instructions that the doors and windows be locked; the serenity suddenly shattered by his intrusive demands. The small Italian man, insistent on pursuing the fulfillment of his order more than insisting the young man obey him, carried out his actions in obvious fear of an invisible manager.

The three healed boys, at peace in the wholeness of one person, murmuring softly whilst playing beside a trickling stream, sensed a change in the air, like the coming of autumn or the first hint of snow, with its light metallic taste; looking up, with alarmed startlement, he leaped without hesitation coming into conspicuity against the backdrop of dark trees, ran over the field between the woods and the house, and raced with fast loping strides, like a huge bipedal lizard, in a desperate attempt to beat the Italian man’s extirpative quest to lock the doors against him and banish him for ever.

Suddenly, against the wishes of the disturbed dreamer, metal shutters began to roll out and blacken the windows and doors with harsh clatters. The small Italian man locked the house, the trinity boy making up ground at a rapid pace, one more shutter, the only hope for the boy, remained to clang into place; the impotent poet skipped like an electrified grasshopper, the Italian threw switches, the marvelous boy ran full pelt and somehow, miraculously, just as the house became impenetrable, he made it under the impossible gap, like sucked in smoke. *(7)

At exactly the same time as the boy crossed the threshold, the twitching poet, denizen of the drug den, was bungee jumped out of the house’s chimney, boinging miles into the sky. He saw the house below, the trees gone; the fields became desert, sandy desert with huge, indistinct, shifting dunes, as blank and unrecognizable as one another. Then a giant house hole appeared and the house, an English, semi-detached mock-Tudor house, incongruous as a traffic light in a rain forest, sank into the depths of the hole. A nuclear missile-silo style metal shutter clasped shut the hole, a fresh tarmac road rolled out over the silo shutters; and finally, from his birds eye view, the aghast young man saw the speck where the ordinary English house, containing the poet’s inner child, his marvelous boy and Virgil, the small Italian key-keeper, become indistinguishable from any other speck in the bleak, barren desert; and the wind blew sand over the fresh, black, hot tarmac as the empty road from nowhere to nowhere, was eaten up by a giant sluggish sandy dune, advancing inexorably over the very spot the flying young man was staring at in astonishment, quaking with disbelief that barely a smidgeon of evidence of its whereabouts remained.

The Little Boy Lost

Father, father, where are you going

       O do not walk so fast.

Speak father, speak to your little boy

       Or else I shall be lost,

The night was dark no father was there

       The child was wet with dew.

The mire was deep, & the child did weep

       And away the vapour flew.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

*****

Part ii) God, pleased with his answer, offers him Eve: "Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self/Thy wish, exactly to thy heart's desire."

(Paradise Lost VIII.450-1).

‘I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company, he is always in paradise.’

Catherine Blake.

Why should I be bound to thee,
O my lovely Myrtle-tree?
Love, free Love, cannot be bound
To any tree that grows on ground.

O! how sick and weary I
Underneath my Myrtle lie;
Like to dung upon the ground,
Underneath my Myrtle bound.

Oft my Myrtle sigh'd in vain
To behold my heavy chain:
Oft my Father saw us sigh,
And laugh'd at our simplicity.

So I smote him, and his gore
Stain'd the roots my Myrtle bore.
But the time of youth is fled,
And grey hairs are on my head.

William Blake (from the Rosetti manuscript) – 1793

*

One hot sunny day, 18 months, several lifetimes later, Tom Thomason, the failed young poet with the lost child, was half drowsing through a lecture by visiting author, Richard Holmes, at Goldsmith’s College. Holmes was reading from the same introduction to songs of innocence and of experience which Tom had read on the day that he lost his own marvelous, innocent, inner child; his inspiration.

‘William Blake, intoned Mr. Holmes, reading from the Songs, ‘began exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy when twenty three, and two years later married Catherine Boucher, the beautiful young daughter of a market gardener, whom he taught to read, mix paint and prepare plates.

The marriage was childless (a significant fact since the Songs were addressed to children), but very happy; and despite periods of poverty and depression, the household attracted many friends and later ‘disciples’.

In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his younger brother Robert in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of 1787 and succumbed, probably to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother's spirit rise up through the ceiling, "clapping its hands for joy." He believed that Robert's spirit continued to visit him and later claimed that in a dream Robert taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other "illuminated" works.

At Lambeth where many of the Songs were composed, Blake was once discovered in his little back-garden sitting naked in the sun under a tree with Catherine, reading Paradise Lost. He called to the friend, ‘Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!’

At this point, Tom, the drowsy failure, recalling that Blake and Keats had walked in Hammersmith, on one of Blake's great rambles, ‘seeing Angels working in the hayfields’, and discussing their latest poems, muttered:

*(8)

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?

In his repose, a collision of images overtook him; he became the other half of Blake and Catherine’s Adam and Eve, naked in the garden at Lambeth, his muse, his Eve, being a mystical, sensuous woman from a foreign library, she infiltrated his consciousness and appeared to him in dreams and across dimensions in acts of synchronicity, she walked in beauty in his imagination, dignified, naked, innocent.

More intonations from the lecture hall infiltrated Tom’s reverie, as the Goldsmith Professor who contributed the Blake page on Wikipedia thanked Mr. Holmes, adding a few words of his own to make a contemporary point.

‘In the 19th century,’ quoted the Wikipedia Professor ‘poet and free love advocate Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a book on Blake drawing attention to the above motifs in which Blake praises "sacred natural love" that is not bound by another's possessive jealousy, the latter characterised by Blake as a "creeping skeleton." Another 19th-century free love advocate, Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), was influenced by Blake's mystical emphasis on energy free from external restrictions.

Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely read as a tribute to free love but the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the "frozen marriage-bed". In Visions, Blake writes:

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain
Of life in weary lust?’

At which, Tom Thomason fell and fell into the endless night…

***

Part iii) Listen to “the voice of the Bard!” who can see past, present, and future.

*(9)

In That Night, friends answered the call of Adam and Eve to join them for tea. A molecular physicist called Yuri, Jim Morrison, rock star, Diane Arbus, the photographer and many other ‘disciples’, who belonged to William Blake’s ‘peopled thoughts’ – including Carol the prostitute, Jason the druggie and John Keats, who said "If Poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all."

There was Yuri the scientist eagerly sharing his hypothesis – “We can make Music out of DNA sequences, due to our new discovery, we can transcribe DNA into a musical sequence and then arrange it in operatic, avante garde, rock n roll or electronic mode, each to their own. What do you think William?”

Everything that lives is holy and Imagination is the divine body in every man. Blake replied:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour.

Auguries of Innocence. 

In the endless night Tom looked back, Orpheus like, to finally glimpse his naked Eve, his Muse; quoting Blake, he said to her “you have ever been an angel to me.” *(10) As he died, Blake saw Tom and his Little Boy Lost’s spirit rise up ‘as one individual soul,’ bespangling the boughs of the Lambeth trees, where they “burst out singing - clapping their hands for joy."

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise. 

M. J. Cooke. 21/02/13. Moscow.

*(1)

Auguries of Innocence (c.f. Diane Arbus) 

*(2)

Contemporary passages follow the ‘experience’ of Tom Thomason. Tom is an allusion to Thomas Chatterton, partly to reflect the stylistic homage to Peter Ackroyd’s novel ‘Chatterton’ and partly to make a comparison between Blake and Chatterton, neither of whom achieved ‘success’ in their lifetimes. The despair at the heart of Tom, the modern poet, is fueled by his lack of inspiration, his separation from his muse. He is, so to speak, ‘damned for Despair’ – technology, (in the shape of Wikipedia) and access to higher education (which Blake didn’t have) provide no solution to his lack of faith and separation from ‘innocence’

*(3)

A made up word meaning ‘sounding like crows.

*(4)

‘Oi-ing’ bobbies hobnailing in his wake.

Vernacular phrase parodying a vison of the police from the 1950’s Dixon of dock green era. Oi! Is a common command. Hobnailing refers to the scramble of their hobnail boots.

*(5)

From ‘Auguries of Innocence’ – William Blake (written 1803)

*(6) The young man (the hope of youth) is a visionary but his visions are narcissistic and necrophilous.

*(7) Minor references to Dante. Blake was always in paradise – Tom, the modern alienated poet, is always in hell.

*(8)

John Keats – Ode to a Nightingale.

*(9)

That Night = Death – (“do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas, is the source of the other half of Tom Thomason’s name.)

*(10)

William Blake’s last words to Catherine, from his deathbed.